Pain
by xheartmehorrid
Summary: [vignette] In the hollows between every touch, it hurt. Midvalley centric.


I do not claim rights to Trigun or the characters portrayed here. Just the words.

Pain

**In the hollows. Between every touch. It hurt. **

He stared into the deep dark eyes, understanding and disbelieving, his fingers trembling under the weight of his spine as he pulled him closer, closer, licking the dirt off his lips and lapping at the alcohol swill in his mouth, the ice cold blue of frozen winter moons locked behind searching black lashes. Deep, deeper, deepest. And his head spun with the heated breaths, the fire in his stomach and chest stirring. Even as he clutched the blue-black hair in desperation he knew. Even as he kissed the scorching lips. The eyes that seared his face. The hands that crawled along his hips and back, a lover, not quite a lover; screaming death, death, death.

There was a shadow creeping in behind those bright blue eyes. Something that told him to bury himself deep inside this man because he wasn't there, he couldn't really be there, because he was in a dark dream and he was out in the desert and his body was such a hot tight tunnel of blood of pain of dirt of hurt and he couldn't be real this time, or anyof the timesbefore. Because this wasn't love. This was an addiction. This was the next best thing to a quick fuck on the back of a motorcycle with Jack Daniels dripping from his hair and the loud and hollow laugher rising in his chest that resounded in his bones and ricocheted off of every dune and wall of solid rock, like sand sliding across the bottom of a jar.

And he remembers the first time that Wolfwood ever made him bleed. How he'd actuallyenjoyed it because it felt so good, it kind of burned, and no, it didn't really hurt that bad, and how beautiful was that man with those blue, blue eyes, when his lips were stained with red? And how beautiful was bleeding? And how beautiful was hurting when it was sex, when it was love, when it was young young young there's still time, all the time in the world? He remembers the first time Legato made him bleed. And Legato was not dark or burning. Legato was not deep hypnosis with his lips or hips or eyes. Legato was not all the rough embodiment of the merciless desert world sitting between his thighs, showing him what it was to be put under aphysical love spell, filling his heart up to its weight in bullets with a single glance from across a crowded room.

Legato was the moonlight shining off the metal corridors. Legato was the sorrow and the madness and the sky at night, the Death song that he played when it was time to kill, the red stained hands, the reeling whispered words that made him scream because he wanted to escape but he would never escape and he never loved Legato, no, he never loved at all, but the worst part was that he was nothing to him, a game to him.

And Legato was not real, only dream-like pain that made him want to sleep for days, the holehe left insidewas so wide. Legato haunted you because he could; the ghost, the phantom presence of pain. Because he wanted you to remember, to suffer like he had suffered.

Wolfwood was haunting because he was so different from everything and anyone else, so close to making Midvalley fall in love with him that it was strange now that here they were together, and their lovemaking only screamed DEATH to him, the reek of fire and alcohol on his breath tickling the hairs on the back ofhis neck, his fingers grasping sliding slipping wet warm but he looked into those ice blue eyes and he saw something there had died and something there had been reborn.

Legato was sobbing screaming begging pleading love and devotion for their Master, for the one who would never care. A slave for the cruelty. Fail to feel the hunger. Fail to feel at all. And Wolfwood. Who was he now? What had changed? What had gone wrong? Or what had been made right? And then he knew. He pulled the man in for a deep kiss, crushing their faces together like he was trying to get inside. So deep it bruised their lips black and red and blue. And then he knew. It was Vash the Stampede. He'd fallen in love with Vash the Stampede. And there was nothing he could do to turn him back.

_What do I do? _He thought hysterically. _I came so close. And what do I have to show for it? Nothing? Sex? This?What? _

And when they laid together afterwards, it was like saying goodbye to something from your past, something intense and overwhelming that it's time to forget, now. It's time to move forward. Like saying goodbye. But Midvalley had nothing to show for love; what had come so close to being love before this, all those times before it. Only the man with the yellow eyes that frightened him in the darkness. The false fingertips that made him cold. The lullabye voice that never made him feel longing. All he had. . .all he had. . .

Was emptiness in the form of loss.

When Wolfwood left in the morning, even before he woke up, he knew that he would never see him again.

And he liked to imagine he never looked back.

* * *


End file.
